ard partly because nature kicks him behind. But in the
first place some types of animal life go forward under pressure from
nature, whilst others lie down and die. In the second place man has
an accumulative faculty, a social memory, whereby he is able to carry
on to the conquest of a new environment whatever has served him in
the old. But this is as it were to compound environments--a process
that ends by making the environment coextensive with the world.
Intelligent assimilation of the new by means of the old breaks down
the provincial barriers one by one, until man, the cosmopolitan animal
by reason of his hereditary constitution, develops a cosmopolitan
culture; at first almost unconsciously, but later on with
self-conscious intent, because he is no longer content to live, but
insists on living well.

As a sequel to this brief examination of the geographic control
considered by itself it would be interesting, if space allowed, to
append a study of the distribution of the arts and crafts of a more
obviously economic and utilitarian type. If the physical environment
were all in all, we ought to find the same conditions evoking the same
industrial appliances everywhere, without the aid of suggestions from
other quarters. Indeed, so little do we know about the conditions
attending the discovery of the arts of life that gave humanity its
all-important start--the making of fire, the taming of animals, the
sowing of plants, and so on--that it is only too easy to misread our
map. We know almost nothing of those movements of peoples, in the course
of which a given art was brought from one part of the world to another.
Hence, when we find the art duly installed in a particular place, and
utilizing the local product, the bamboo in the south, let us say, or
the birch in the north, as it naturally does, we easily slip into the
error of supposing that the local products of themselves called the
art into existence. Similar needs, we say, have generated similar
expedients. No doubt there is some truth in this principle; but I doubt
if, on the whole, history tends to repeat itself in the case of the
great useful inventions. We are all of us born imitators, but inventive
genius is rare.

Take the case of the early palaeoliths of the drift type. From Egypt,
Somaliland, and many other distant lands come examples which Sir John
Evans finds "so identical in form and character with British specimens
that they might have been manufacture